Who says Rutten stands for that behaviour or that it was Rutten's direction to stand around to celebrate Jones' goal? That's very much symptomatic of poor on-field leadership. Everyone knows we lack on-field leaders.
Serious question to the Rutten critics. With what is arguably the most difficult fixture in the competition while also playing pretty much all the draftees from the last 3 years that we can play, does anyone seriously believe we have a top 8 list? Mind you we play 3rd, 4th, 6th, 10th and 11th twice. And we've already played all of the most difficult teams with 18th, 15th, 11th and 10th remaining.
If people believe Rutten should be coaching this team to finals this year, then people are grossly overestimating the quality and experience of the list. If people don't believe we have a top 8 list given the fixture, then we didn't finish top 8 as expected.
I genuinely cannot see why people are so harsh on Rutten. Redman, Hind, Parish, Laverde, BZT, Caldwell, Wright, Draper, Stringer last year and even Shiel and McGrath recently have completely changed the way they played under him. That's on top of the positive developments of Hobbs, Perkins, Durham, D'Ambrosio and eventually Cox, Reid, Bryan, Baldwin, Menzie, Tex, Eyre, Brand etc. You can see the players starting to understand team defence and defending the ground better for longer against good opponents. There's still a lot of progress to be made, but that is expected as the coach and players build chemistry and adapt to the game plan. Rutten clearly has the credentials to build a defensively sound team given he did exactly that at Richmond who had the players to implement it.
The positives far outweigh the negatives. Developing a list requires patience. Will Rutten win a premiership? I don't know, but I don't know if McRae, Voss or Longmuir will win one either. It's funny because some Fremantle supporters were saying the same thing about Longmuir last year. Imagine if they sacked him instead of recognising that a young team takes time to develop?
